Adelaide Fortune Holderness, 1913-2013

UNCG is saddened to note the passing of Adelaide Fortune Holderness, a member of the Woman's College class of 1934 and former Alumni Association preseident and member of the Board of Governors of the Consolidated University of North Carolina System. Ms. Holderness was a tireless advocate for her alma mater and for higher education in North Carolina.

In 1990, Mrs. Holderness was interviewed as part of the UNCG Centennial Oral History Project. In the interview, she discusses her life as a student, working in the offices of Dr. Walter Clinton Jackson and Dean Harriet Elliott and her presidency of the Alumni Association. She remembers friendships made with faculty, the administrations of Chancellors Walter Clinton Jackson, Otis Singletary, Edward Kidder Graham Jr., James Ferguson, Gordon Blackwell and William Moran and Dean Katherine Taylor. She talks about her love of the Alumni House, its décor and purpose, and her time on the Board of Governors when the Consolidated University of North Carolina System was instituted. She recalls coeducation, integration, the changes they brought to the college and the controversy between the Alumni Association and Chancellor Moran regarding funding and the Alumni Association’s relationship with the Development Office.

You can read the text of this interview with Ms. Holderness here. Her obituary in the Greensboro News & Record can be read here.

Adelaide Fortune Holderness will be greatly missed. A memorial service will take place at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec.18, at First Baptist Church in Greensboro. The family will receive friends following the service. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, memorial gifts be made to: First Presbyterian Church, 617 N. Elm St., Greensboro, N.C. 27401; University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1000 Spring Garden St., Greensboro, N.C. 27403; Hospice of the Piedmont, 1801 Westchester Dr., High Point, N.C. 27262; or the charity of your choice.